Modern mobile devices often have multiple functionalities that cannot execute energy-efficiently on general purpose processors. As an example, a functionality may require real-time, very low latency, and high bandwidth computing for handling of graphics data in game applications. On the other hand, another functionality may support sensor data handling that typically has very long latencies without performance degradation.
Existing mobile device architectures often do not support the optimization of hardware and software for application requirements. Very simple tasks may be handled with powerful processors, while real-time, low-latency applications may be executed in a computing environment having long latencies. Connections between subsystems may not be well optimized for an application. For example, a connection-oriented interface may be used when better power efficiency could be reached by using a connection-less interface. On the other hand, a long-latency connection-less interface may be used to transmit data having very tight latency and timing jitter requirements.
Consequently, there is a real market need to provide devices, such as mobile devices, that execute efficiently for each of the intended functionalities.